by Vanda Krefft
Sunrise (1927), for which Fox gave the German director F. W. Murnau complete artistic and financial freedom, now stands as one of Hollywood’s greatest silent movies. (Author’s collection; permission courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox, Sunrise © 1927)
Anticipating an enthusiastic welcome for Sunrise from American audiences, Fox personally saw Murnau off when the director sailed from New York in early 1927 to fulfill remaining obligations in Germany. Their smiles would soon fade. (Courtesy of Quigley Photographic Archive, GTM720825, Georgetown University Library, Booth Family Center for Special Collections)
Despite disappointment over Sunrise and Murnau’s subsequent movies, Fox Film’s fortunes soared in the late 1920s. Director John Ford had a particularly deft touch in pleasing both the boss and mass audiences: his Four Sons (1928) blended “mother love” with strong antiwar sentiments. (Author’s collection; permission courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox, Four Sons © 1928)
To ensure optimal results for his revolutionary Movietone sound technology, Fox didn’t release his first talking feature film, Mother Knows Best, until more than a year after Warner Bros.’ The Jazz Singer. Louise Dresser (left) and Madge Bellamy starred as mother and daughter. (Author’s collection; permission courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox, Mother Knows Best © 1928)
Attempting to atone for earlier, awkward depictions of race, Fox made Hearts in Dixie (1929), the first Hollywood feature with an (almost) all-black cast. Accomplished stage actor Clarence Muse played a former slave who sells his farm and sacrifices his longing for companionship in order to send his young grandson (Eugene Jackson) north for an education. (Author’s collection; permission courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox, Hearts in Dixie © 1929)
Fox wanted to cancel The Valiant (1929) because he didn’t believe star Paul Muni was handsome enough to appeal to female audiences. He reluctantly changed his mind, and Muni earned a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his performance. (Author’s collection; permission courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox, The Valiant © 1929)
A freak car accident on July 17, 1929, changed the course of Fox’s life and, ultimately, that of the Fox motion picture empire. To the right, covered with a blanket, lies the dead body of Fox’s chauffeur, Joseph Boyes. (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
To offset rumors that he had suffered serious brain damage, Fox—seen here with reporters on the Fox Hall lawn—held a press conference at his home in mid-October 1929. (Author’s collection)
Following the stock market crash, Fox hired future U.S. Supreme Court chief justice Charles Evans Hughes to help him save his companies from financial predators. As seen here, Hughes promptly went on vacation with his wife to Bermuda, abandoning his client to an unsympathetic law partner. (Author’s collection)
Despite receivership petitions, stockholders at the March 5, 1930, special meeting overwhelmingly endorsed Fox’s leadership. To his right is “gladiator” lawyer Samuel Untermyer; at his left is James Francis Burke; and behind Fox, to the left and facing left, is his close friend Albert M. Greenfield. (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Backed by the Chase Bank, Chicago-based utilities magnate Harley L. Clarke drove Fox out of Fox Film and Fox Theatres in April 1930 and promptly wrecked both companies. (Author’s collection)
Rather than give young John Wayne a $25 weekly salary increase, Clarke’s administration dismissed him, despite his widely praised performance in The Big Trail. (Image courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; permission courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox, The Big Trail © 1930)
Chase Bank head Albert H. Wiggin chose not to help William Fox; over the next three and a half years, the bank lost $69.6 million trying to prop up Fox’s incompetent successors. (Author’s collection)
Broken by the loss of his companies, Fox fraudulently filed for bankruptcy and bribed federal judge J. Warren Davis, seen here (right) with his attorney, William A. Gray, during a recess from his May 1941 corruption of justice trial. (Philadelphia Record photograph morgue, Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vanda Krefft is a former entertainment industry journalist whose work has appeared in national magazines and newspapers. She has a BA in English and an MA in communication, both from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. The Man Who Made the Movies is her first book. In support of the work, she received fellowships and grants from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Dedalus Foundation, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Historical Society of Southern California, the American Jewish Archives, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Hagley Museum and Library, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and was also awarded residencies at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and Wildacres Retreat.
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COPYRIGHT
THE MAN WHO MADE THE MOVIES. Copyright © 2017 by Vanda Krefft. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* Loew’s and M-G-M president Nicholas M. Schenck had also vigorously denied the rumor, branding it “maliciously created, possibly with the idea of stock manipulation” and “utterly false” (“‘Lies’ Is Comment of William Fox On Reported Loew’s-M-G-M Deal,” Film Daily, Dec. 11, 1928, 1; “Schenck Hits Loew-Fox Rumor As Deliberate Misstatement,” Exhibitors Herald-World, Jan. 26, 1929, 21).
* The lack of recognition wasn’t surprising: Fox hadn’t issued a new publicity photo of himself in about fifteen years.
* Fox referred to the town as “Tulchva,” but “Tolcsva” is now the accepted name, with “Tolscva” as a variant spelling.
* One of the worst snowstorms in U.S. history, the 1888 blizzard known as “the Great White Hurricane” dumped piles of snow up to fifty feet high throughout the Eastern seaboard from Maryland to Maine. An estimated four hundred people died, some one hundred of them in New York City.
* Twain’s remark alludes to the Westminster Catechism of 1647, which begins, “What is the chief end of man?” and goes on to respond, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”
* In another version of the story, the boxer’s name was Spike McCarthy, the show was held at Clarendon Hall on the corner of Th
irteenth Street and Third Avenue, and it wasn’t Spike who assaulted Cliff Gordon, but angry audience members, who threw both boys out into the street. (Herbert Corey, “Comedy Team’s Trials,” Chicago News, Nov. 5, 1912.) In yet another telling, Gordon got one eye blackened by a stranger and the other by the social club’s secretary. (“Black Eye Nucleus of Great Fortune,” Duluth News Tribune (Duluth, MN), Jan. 4, 1914, 10.) To Fox, it was all basically the same story—only the facts were different.
* Fox had changed jobs several times since going to work for G. Lippmann and Sons (Transcript of William Fox interview with Upton Sinclair, Sinclair MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University [hereafter Transcript], 10).
* Cloth shrinking, also called cloth sponging, was a process of steaming fabric to preshrink it before manufacturers cut the material into garments.
* Benjamin Moss and his brother Paul went on to build and operate a chain of movie theaters. Benjamin Moss also produced several movies during the mid-1910s (“Moss Announces Initial Subject,” Moving Picture World, Sept. 16, 1916, 1843).
* Mona’s official first name was Caroline. Fox family members do not know why Caroline was called Mona.
* The Automatic Vaudeville Company was owned by two other future movie studio founders, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures and Marcus Loew of the Loew’s theater chain and M-G-M.
* Although Upton Sinclair would later write that Fox had also been thrilled by the 1903 twelve-minute film The Great Train Robbery, in the transcript of their interview, Fox said he couldn’t remember any of it and referred to it as “the movie with the gun you spoke about” (Upton Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, [Los Angeles: Upton Sinclair, 1933], 34).
* The New York Evening World was particularly zealous. One headline read, “Vile Moving Pictures Corrupting the Morals of Countless Children,” and another, “Health as Well as Morals of Children Is Menaced in Cheap Movie Theatres.”
* “Illustrated songs” used lantern slides of images and text projected onto the movie screen (Rebecca Leydon, Review of The Sounds of Early Cinema, by Richard Abel and Rick Altman, Journal of the American Musicological Society 58, no. 1 [Spring 2005]: 231).
* Bingham applied that description specifically to “Russian Hebrews,” but went on to castigate “Hebrews” in general as conniving, skilled criminals.
* Big Tim Sullivan was the vice president of the Max Hochstim Association (George Kibbe Turner, “Tammany’s Control of New York by Professional Criminals,” McClure’s Magazine, June 1909, 121).
* Born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, Kelly changed his name to fit in with the Irish power brokers. He adored Big Tim and kept a large portrait of him on a wall at his “Little Naples” bar on Great Jones Street (“Gangsters Again Engaged in a Murderous War,” New York Times, June 9, 1912, SM1; Turner, “Tammany’s Control of New York by Professional Criminals,” 125).
* The payment of $20,000 was in the form of four $5,000 promissory notes, secured by a mortgage on property Fox owned at 50 and 52 West 3rd Street (William Fox statement, ECC-USKF, at 15).
* Often five one-reel films were shown, but fewer if a crowd was waiting outside (“Dewey Theatre,” Variety, Dec. 19, 1908, 13).
* He later added a small, open-air movie theater with folding chairs on the Riverside’s sloped roof.
* These were the Academy of Music, the Star, the New York Roof, the Washington, and the Nemo.
* Fox appears to have sold this boat in 1916 and later to have bought a fifty-foot cruiser, which he also named the Mona Belle (“Morton F. Plant Challenges for Two Historic Yacht Cups,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 14, 1916, 3; “Yacht Is Disabled, Sailor Saved from Sea,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 18, 1930, 13).
* In 1876, Edison established his research laboratory in the Menlo Park neighborhood of Raritan Township, New Jersey.
* Although he was severely hearing-impaired, Edison’s favorite among his own inventions was the phonograph. He loved music—it was “so helpful to the human mind.” (Thomas Edison, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison [New York: Philosophical Library, 1948], 169–70).
* The number is imprecise because as new theaters signed on, existing licensees dropped out.
* This was the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Banking and Currency.
* The city bought most of the Dreamland site for $1.8 million, and the New York City Aquarium now stands there (“Last of Dreamland Sold for $407,750,” New York Times, Mar. 23, 1921, 31).
* The Metropole Hotel was owned by John Considine, Big Tim’s partner in the Sullivan and Considine vaudeville theater circuit (M. R. Werner, Tammany Hall [New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1928], 501).
* Becker wouldn’t reveal this alleged conversation with Big Tim until July 1915, when he made an unsuccessful eleventh-hour appeal to avoid execution. By that time, Big Tim was dead (“Becker Counsel To Be Heard On Monday in Appeal for New Trial,” New York Herald, July 24, 1915, 1).
* Big Tim had won that position in the 1902 election, but seldom attended roll call, made no speeches, and distinguished himself only by winning the congressional pinochle championship. In 1905, “disgusted” by Congress’s slow pace, he quit (Werner, Tammany Hall, 508; “Sullivan Sizes Up His Job,” New York Times, Mar. 21, 1905, 1).
* Ironically, New York State’s 1911 Sullivan Law (sponsored by Big Tim) made it a felony to carry or attempt to use a blackjack, bludgeon, or sandbag (“Stricter Weapons Law,” New York Times, May 30, 1911, 1).
* Big Tim’s funeral was filmed by the Gotham Film Company, which released the footage in 1914 as part of a four-reel feature, The Life of “Big Tim” Sullivan or from Newsboy to Senator (Gotham Film Co. ad, Motion Picture News, Mar. 28, 1914, 13).
* The city’s Building Bureau agreed with Fox and soon closed down the Dewey as a fire hazard (“Fighting to Reopen Old Dewey Theatre,” New York Times, July 13, 1915, 8).
* The estate paid off Margaret Catherine Sullivan, previously unknown publicly as Big Tim’s child, with $50,000 from a life insurance policy.
* In its landmark May 1911 ruling against Standard Oil, the U.S. Supreme Court had established the “rule of reason” as the guiding principle for antitrust cases. That is, it didn’t matter what the initial purpose of a business combination had been. All that mattered were the effects: if the combination restrained trade, it was illegal.
* Otherwise, small business owners would have faced the insurmountable financial obstacle of having to prove all over again that an illegal combination existed.
* Edwards has been remembered mainly as the step-grandfather of director Blake Edwards, whose movies include Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Days of Wine and Roses, and the Pink Panther series.
* Henry Belmar is sometimes cited as the director of Life’s Shop Window (Terry Ramsaye, “The Romantic History of the Motion Picture,” Photoplay, Oct. 1924, 124), but Edwards got credit in the ads (Fox Film ad, Life’s Shop Window, Motion Picture World, 142).
* The others were Nathaniel King, Anthony Kuser, Thomas McCarter, and Uzal McCarter.
* In mid-January 1915, Prudential was mutualized—that is, the company bought back its own shares for $455 apiece and redistributed ownership among policyholders (“Prudential Shifts to Mutual Basis,” New York Times, Apr. 1, 1943). Because Fidelity Trust owned nearly half of Prudential’s 40,000 shares, it received a $3 million profit. Rather than keep the money in the bank vault, Fidelity president Uzal McCarter decided to distribute it to stockholders—who were mainly McCarter, his brother Tom, and Forrest Dryden—as an astonishing 375 percent dividend. A key point in the plan was that although Fidelity Trust was considered to have bought its 19,993 Prudential shares in 1902 for $6 million, it had never actually paid for them and Prudential had never bothered to ask for the money (“Trust Co. Declares a 375 P.C. Dividend,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 1915, 13; “Dryden Now Faces Contempt Penalty,” New York Times, June 23, 1921, 1).
* Fox claimed to have coined the term photoplay during a 1909 co
nversation with John Zanft, then a New York Morning Telegraph vaudeville reviewer and later a Fox Theatres executive (“Fox Takes Credit for Coining Word,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 15, 1916, 9; Lester A. Walton, “Music and the Stage,” New York Age, July 21, 1910, 6).
* The concept, which referred not to a fanged, Dracula-like creature, but to a woman who overpowers men through sexual seduction, was originated by Rudyard Kipling in his 1897 six-stanza poem, “The Vampire.” The first four words, “A fool there was” (the siren’s victim), gave playwright Porter Emerson Browne the title of his stage adaptation.